The 11 Step Ultimate Guide: How to Build a Niche Website That Can Make $2,985 a Month

If you are learning about building niche websites, then you've just landed on the only resource you will need to get started.

Today, I am going to give you the ultimate guide that will teach you how to brainstorm, rank in Google, and make very real money from your very own niche site.

You see, I built my very first website back in 2005 (over a decade ago) and I've been building these types of sites ever since as well as maintaining my own blog here at Niche Pursuits. You can read more about my qualifications to talk about this subject; however, I feel very confident that this truly is the only resource you will need to get your very first niche website up and earning.

I'll give you the knowledge, you just need to add water your own effort.

I quit my job in 2011 because my niche websites were making over $10,000 a month. But does this stuff still work? Absolutely!

As proof, I have a site that I started last year that made $2,985 last month! The potential is 100% still there to make good money with niche websites, and I'm going to show you how.

Warning! This is a VERY long article with lots of videos and links to resources. In order to learn everything, you will need to come back to this page often to watch all the videos and read all the other resources. However, everything is here…it will just take you some time to get through it all.

Let's get this started!

Recent Results

Before we jump into the details, I know that you might be interested in seeing some actual results. Remember, these results don't come automatically. You have to put in the time and effort to achieve results like this.

I'm going to share a couple screenshots from the earnings from just 1 of my websites last month. Then I'll give you more details about how I achieved these results, but more importantly, how you can hopefully replicate this with your own website.

Amazon Associates Earnings

First Tracking ID:

Second Tracking ID (same website):

Google Adsense Earnings

Other Affiliate Earnings:

The site also made an additional $66.08 from another affiliate deal.

Total Earnings from this 1 Niche Website: $2,985.26

Now that I've dangled that tempting carrot in front of you, let's dive into how to actually make a site like that happen.

Brief Overview

The massive guide that you will find below includes everything you need to know to build your very first niche website. However, there is a lot of content there, so I'd like to provide just a quick overview of the process.

The whole idea behind a successful niche website is to find a target niche, start ranking in Google for lots of keywords in your chosen niche, and then turn that free traffic into earnings through affiliate offers (like Google Adsense or Amazon Associates), or through your own product offerings.

Consider this like a table of contents for how to build a niche website from scratch:

Brainstorm general market and broad niche ideas

Begin In-depth keyword research

Determine what problem your site is solving. How will your site stand out?

Pick a good domain name.

Host your website. Pick a Theme and get a logo.

Develop a long term content strategy.

Pick a monetization strategy.

Link Building.

Social Media and Other Marketing Strategies

Maximize earnings through list building.

Consider long term strategies to continue growing.

Tools Recommended

Throughout this guide, I mention several software tools that will help you build a website faster or better. These are tools that I use and recommend, but all of them are not required:

What is a Niche? And What is a Niche Website?

I want to start off by simply clarifying how I personally think of niche sites. A niche site does NOT mean a small website. There, I said it.

I think too many people think that a “Niche” website means building a site that only has 10 or 20 pages of content. This is simply not the case.

“Niche” really means a small segment of an overall market or product. It means laser focused on one particular topic…or niche. As a perfect example, and to prove that I’m not the only one that thinks this way; check out the Wikipedia page of what a “Niche” Market is right here.

And even better, guess what example Wikipedia gives as an example of a Niche market/website? ESPN.com! That’s right ESPN.com is a niche website. It focuses exclusively (with laser focused intensity) on Sports. Again, this isn’t my example, this is from Wikipedia. Yes, this is a VERY large niche site, but it is indeed a niche site.

ESPN.com produces dozens of articles, videos, and more each and everyday.

I share this simply to get the incorrect idea out of your head, that “niche” means a “small” website. It doesn’t.

However, its more common to think of a niche site as one that targets a more narrow niche than just Sports in general. A smaller niche in sports would be perhaps, Little League baseball, or Curling in Canada, or Speed skating. However, just because your niche site only covers curling in Canada, doesn’t mean it can’t be thousands of pages of content. Make sense?

So, a niche site is a site that covers the sub-segment of any market. The site could be one page or a million pages of content, its still a niche site.

Now that I've clarified how I view a “niche” website, let's move to step 1 in how to build a niche site.

1. Brainstorm Niche Ideas

Several months ago, I started something called, Niche Site Project 3.0. The main idea of the project was for 3 coaches (Jake, Perrin, and I) to train 3 students that have never built a successful website before, how to build a niche website that makes at least $500 a month.

The first step to building a successful niche website is picking a niche to target. This just means, what general topic are you interested in or even better, what can be profitable?

What Does a Successful Niche Site Look Like?

Helps readers or customers find answers and solutions to their questions or problems in your chosen niche.

Your site will eventually have hundreds of articles based on hundreds of very low competition keywords.

Your site should not be targeting 1 keyword…but targeting all of them!

Start small, but perpetually grow as the success continues.

More concerned with answering specific questions and low competition keywords than search volume.

Main source of traffic is Google

Some articles will be “Pillar” articles and linkable assets; others just short answers to queries; a good mix of types of articles

Social traffic will be utilized; perhaps a great deal depending on niche

More concerned with building a brand than EMDs or linkbuilding short cuts

Long term goal is to build a large email list and sell your own products

One of the keys to success with your niche website is keyword research. I've written extensively about keyword research in the past. However, the main idea is that you will rank higher and faster in Google if you target phrases that people are searching for on Google that are not extremely competitive.

These videos will walk you through SEVERAL examples of the exact guidance that I provided above. If the outline above wasn't enough details for you, these videos definitely will be. I highly recommend you watch these to help you pick your niche.

2. Begin In-depth Keyword Research

Now that you know what general niche you want to go into, it's time to do more in-depth keyword research.

I recommend using Long Tail Pro to make the keyword research process easier and faster. The most essential thing to remember with keyword research is that you want to go where the competition is low.

If you can target a few low competition keywords, you are much more likely to rank than if you were to target highly competitive terms. This means that you will often need to target very low search volume keywords…and that's just fine!

7. Pick a Monetization Strategy

Now we get to the step where you finally get to start thinking about making money for your website! The previous steps will help your site get great content and your site may even start ranking in Google before you do any link building at all!

Watch this Video for even greater depth on making money from your website:

8. Link Building for Niche Websites

Link building is a very in-depth and often controversial topic. On one hand, some people feel like link building is so critical to a site's success; on the other, you have people that never do any linkbuilding and do really well with niche sites. I personally tend to be somewhere in the middle.

I don’t believe that link building is the most important activity you can be doing on your site. I think keyword research and creating great content is the most important activity. However, I do see the value in getting links as well…this is clearly a huge ranking factor in Google.

However, I’m a strong believer that your most valuable links are going to come naturally. I have several sites that I’ve never done a single outreach or link building “campaign” for that have thousands of links. So, it’s not that I don’t think links are important (they are)…I just don’t believe that it’s always necessary to personally put in the effort to get every single link. Lots of links will come on their own…if you do things right.

Advanced Link Building for Your Niche Website

The above section was focused mostly on very basic link building strategies, and to be honest, that may be all you ever need! However, there is so much more that can be done to help your site get more links pointing to it.

In a lot of ways, this strategy is very similar to the long tail keyword strategy we regularly talk about in the keyword research phase of site building. Basically, you focus your efforts on more specific search queries in the hopes of ranking for those less competitive searches and building an audience.

This is called a “bracelet and charm” strategy, which as you’ll see in the video is just a way to visualize how your primary keyword/category connects to all the more narrow, long tail searches inside of that category.

This is a unique strategy of using the popular site Reddit.com to drive traffic to your niche site. You need to be careful with this, because its easy to get your account on Reddit closed for not following their guidelines.

However, I don't claim to be an expert at Pinterest traffic, so I will simply say that I've had some decent success with Pinterest, but there are others that have had PHENOMENAL success with this traffic source.

10. Maximize Earnings Through List Building

Many niche website builders never get to the step of actually building out an email list. And quite frankly, there is nothing wrong with that! I've done very well building sites that simply rank in Google and I get paid from affiliate offers (Google Adsense and Amazon Associates mostly).

However, if your niche website turns into something that you would like to take to the next level, you've got to start building an email list.

An email list will allow you to sell your products or affiliate offers to interested buyers over and over again.

“An email list is critical because you can’t build your content on rented land. So many brands and companies build their audiences on Facebook and Google+, which is fine, but we don’t own those names – Facebook and Google do. If we are thinking like real media companies, the asset is in the audience. Getting an email address is the first critical step to figuring out who my reader is, and hopefully in the future, my customer of some sort. If our goal is to drive sales or keep customers happy in some way, we first need to get them as part of our audience.

11. Long Term Strategies to Grow Your Niche Website

Wow! Now that you've gotten through the first 10 steps, you should have a successful niche website on your hands!

However, I would like to point out a few ways that you can keep growing your niche website into a larger business.

Here's 3 ways that you can make more money with your new found skill of building niche websites:

Build MORE niche websites

Get MORE traffic to your current website

Make MORE money from each visitor

For most of my niche website “career” I've opted for option 1…just building more niche websites. Often once I get them ranking in Google and the money is coming in somewhat passively, I have just decided to start a new website. If this sounds like a good option for you, then congrats, start back at step 1 and build a new site!

You may decide to keep all the websites or you can venture into selling off some of your website for a profit at that point.

Or you may decide to continue focusing on this one niche website and simply grow it larger. The most obvious way to do this is add more content. There are always more keywords that you could be targeting in your niche, and these additional keywords and articles are likely to bring in more traffic.

This is an excellent strategy that I am currently employing on my niche website that made $2,985 last month that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Building one website to the level that it is making more than your full-time job is not at all out of the realm of possibility.

There are LOTS of niche websites making six-figures a year. Don't believe me? Just check out the constant flow of listings for sites making that much on the Empire Flippers Marketplace.

Finally, the last way to grow your niche website business is to make more money from each visitor. You can do this through split testing where your ads are placed, becoming an affiliate for an offer with higher payouts, or building an email list and selling more often to that list.

However, another HUGE way to make more money from your own site is to create your own product. Instead of making a 6 to 8% cut from Amazon Associates, you could start making 100% of the revenue if you create and sell the product.

The types of products you could create are endless from ebooks, software, video tutorials, physical products, and more.

I've personally been doing well lately with my own physical products and then selling them on my own website and through the Amazon FBA program. If you want to read about getting started with the Amazon FBA program, I've written how I got started here.

However, the point is to think about whether it's worth it for you to move from being just an affiliate to being the actual product creator. Both have advantages and disadvantages, so I will leave that decision up to you.

Although, I will simply leave you with this thought. The website I mentioned at the beginning of this post that makes me roughly $3,000 a month from Amazon Associates and Google Adsense also sells my own physical products!

So, this website actually makes me much MORE money that I reported. Last month, this website sent roughly 1,400 visitors to my own listings on Amazon and generated sales revenue of approximately $4,200 from those visitors.

This $4,200 is in addition to the $3,000 I made from affiliate commissions.

So, you should at least consider developing your own product as it can dramatically increase the earnings from your niche website.

Where to Go From Here?

With nearly 20 hours of videos and tons of resources to go through above, obviously you won't be able to soak it all in at once. But this resource is here for you to come back to again and again.

In addition, I would recommend that you get on my email list so that I can notify you when I have more in-depth tutorials on building a successful online business. Join my email list right here.

Overall, this article provides you everything you will need to get started building a niche website. However, the ability to stay motiviated and put in the work over the next several months needs to come from you. This is not an overnight business, but it can be a very real one.

The website data that I've shared throughout this post was started about a year and a half ago and is now making about $3,000 a month. The results can happen, but at this point its really up to you.

I would love to hear your thoughts or experiences building niche websites below in the comments.

it’s time to move to an authority site model by developing an authority for our niche sites in their niches

I’m not sure I follow exactly what you mean. If you’re saying grow the site, then Spencer mentions that in Step 11, option 2. Get MORE Traffic To Your Current Site

Or you may decide to continue focusing on this one niche website and simply grow it larger. The most obvious way to do this is add more content. There are always more keywords that you could be targeting in your niche, and these additional keywords and articles are likely to bring in more traffic.

Anyway, just curious what you mean by authority site model… A lot of times people just mean a bigger site with better content.
Cheers

I’m sure that’s what he means. As I explained in the article, niche does NOT mean small…it means laser focus. Sure, you want to be an authority in your niche…and your site might grow to thousands of pages of content. Your site will still be a “niche” site.

At the end of the day, people can call it what they want, “authority” site or “niche” site…its the same thing, and this guide teaches exactly how to build one. (I know you 100% get that, Doug…thanks!)

Sobuj Prantor

Hey Spencer, This is an epic guide and I happy to see an up to date collection of your methods all in one place. I added a link from my guide on the topic to this one as a reference. It’ll take me a while to read the whole post and watch the videos. Well done!
Doug

Hey Spencer, whew, that is definitely quite the resource. Great idea to consolidate everything in one spot for easy reference. I will be sure to share the details with my audience, as we use many of the same tools and follow similar principles. Nice job!

I am researching amazon affiliate process hope it will help me and need more effort continuously.

Leo

November 11, 2016

Thank you for sharing this great article, and that the niche sites still work. I am far more beginner, but I have been slowly building out a site for awhile and it just broke into double digits a couple months back. In October, I made $13.81 which I am thrilled with, and it’s super motivating to hear about those earning serious money from the niche sites.

Just started my first Amazon associates site and struggling a little. I’m going to use this article along with niche site project 3.0 as my guide. Thanks Spencer, this is very comprehensive. Can’t believe you giveaway so much info for free

Mark

November 12, 2016

Hi Spencer, sorry this is somewhat unrelated to this post but I figured the most recent post is the best way to ask you a question.

Have you noticed over the past few days (basically, since the elections) a drop in sales and/or traffic on Amazon? Be it your own product sales, affiliate sales, or both?

Kelly

November 14, 2016

Thanks for these tips, Spencer! One quick question — is there a big benefit to buying an aged domain vs. buying a new one in terms of page ranking and authority? Can that be a short cut to getting to the first page of Google? Thanks!

John Duggan

November 14, 2016

Wow no need to look anywhere else for guidance. Couple of questions Spencer. Should one use your own name or aliases when creating a couple of niche sites? What happens when your site gets really popular (can only happen if you follow this great advice ), should you go for VPS hosting? Is Bluehost friendly towards multiple niche sites being hosted?

That was the longest post I have ever seen. Currently I am making more than $3000 per month from a single site just as you have shown. Started the second one. Doing link building and content creation. Hope It will rank in a few months.

Spencer – thanks a million for pulling this all together in one step by step guide and all in one location. Despite all your other great content and posts this IS your best ever blog guide! please don’t’ take it down or move it! My question though is this and I know it depends on time, but please give us some guide as to how long it would take on average for a part time effort – evenings 1 day weekend to get a site to stage where it’s earning $500 per month. I did hear you mention 8 months to a year. Any general indication? Thanks Buddy from the UK!

Bookmarked this. Another great niche site tutorial from the expert. I’ve tried to build some niche sites. Even though none of them did’nt succeed yet, but, I will never give up. There will always be a way if there is a will, right ?

Andy

November 17, 2016

When looking for niches I’m running into sites with good traffic (35k+), low DA (single digits) but a high placement on Google although the content is weak.
Checking with SEMrush I can see some of them have quite a few backlinks (over 300). It appears to be PBN’s behind to boost their ranking.
What’s your opinion on how to compete with PBN backed sites? Is it worth the effort? Can I outrank them with good content and patience?

Hello, Spancer.. !!
Wow .. That is quite an Awesome piece of Information on Niche Sites…
I have been reading your blogs for the past 1 year and I am always fascinated by the quality of the Nichepursuits that you have maintained with every new and unique contents…
Will be waiting for more of you.
Thank You.

Hey Spencer that is one long post and correctly wont be enough to be digested in one sitting, I have bookmarked this one as a resource to go and visit every now and then, Thanks for sharing and wish me luck on my niche site as well.

Pravin

November 20, 2016

Amazing masterpiece article, Spencer!

I’ve been following this website and long tail pro for a while now. I will be taking action steps consistently in growing a niche site starting this week only and report back to you with case study also!

Just a side note and question- LTP’s service and the tool’s functionality has really gone down. Which other tools would you recommend for keyword research for finding the best low competition keywords ?

Vince

November 21, 2016

Thank you Spencer. I have been floundering around trying to make money online for about 3 years. Minimum amounts earned as an Amazon and Clickbank affiliate. Maybe enough for a case of beer at the end of the year after my hosting expenses. I was excited when I learned how to build a WordPress site considering I only knew how to get email when I started, but I have become disillusioned ever since. Thanks again.

Louis

November 21, 2016

Let me give you guys an idea of what a bad niche is. I setup a camera site couple years back, and found out very quickly that “cameras” of any kind are very competitive, and this goes for camera accessories also, at the time, even the keywords seemed fairly doable, however, I spent months, and months going no-where. tip: if you choose a keyword that you think is good, and your video does not rank within seconds of submitting your videos, then that maybe an indication that there maybe a challenge ahead. If you picked a good keyword, then your video will rank high almost immediately. I created 20 videos around various products; Only 1 video managed to rank #1, and 15 min later the video was replaced by another; This is how competitive this niche is; Just because you are an expert on cameras or gopro does not mean you will get an easy pass to break into this niche; cameras have been around for many, many years, and there are camera affiliate sites that have been around for many, many years, so you have to complete with affiliate, amazon, ebay, and actual name brand camera sites. If you disagree, then feel free to let me know, and why, so choosing the right niche from the start is imperative. The worst thing you do is listen to the wind..”oh that is a great niche” that is no niche research, and could end up costing you 100’s or even 1000s in the long run; is your time not valuable?

Excellent tutorial. I Will work on it this week, just that I’m looking for. Thanks.

Mike

December 1, 2016

Hey Spencer, thanks for writing such an awesome article! I’m getting started on the journey of my first niche site and your step-by-step playbook is invaluable to me.

Three questions:

1. I signed up for the free trial of LTP and the interface is pretty different. Is this a trial thing or has the software changed since your videos? For example, there’s no column simply labeled “Domain Authority” when looking at Top 10 results per keyword.

2. I’m having trouble generating a large list of base keywords. I tried to follow the example in Samara’s coaching call video and I used seed keywords ranging from 1-5 words in length and I used your modifiers such as “best”, “vs”, and “and”. I wound up with a list of 201 words. I’m sure it’s operator error here, so any tips for building a better seed keyword list?

3. My first niche of choice is something I am personally very interested in, but it doesn’t have much in the way of < 30 KC keywords. The overwhelming majority are in the 30-45 range. If I were to stick with this niche in spite of competition, how does this change the roadmap to success? Is it even advisable to try as a first-timer?

1. The videos need to be updated. The trial is the same software as the paid version.
2. 201 words sounds like a good seed keyword list. If I’m understanding you right, you can punch those 201 words into Long Tail Pro and get hundreds of suggestions based on each of those seed keywords.
3. It does sound like a difficult niche. I personally would go after a different niche that is easier. However, if you just can’t see your life without building a site in that niche that you are passionate about, go for it.

Mike

December 1, 2016

Thanks for the quick response!

Actually 201 keywords is the result of the roughly 10-15 seed keywords I put in. I’ll try to put my thinking hat on tonight and come up with some more to see if I can add some diversity. My broad topic is very deep so I should be able to come up with some more (I hope)!

As for my niche, I could go on without it, and I intend to fully research a few other ideas before committing to a competitive niche, but I sure would enjoy writing on this topic. We’ll see how it goes!

I also have the trial version and see the differences. The instructions to find ideal keywords aren’t comparable to the new LTP version. Could you, instead, update the written instructions to narrow our results? Thanks 🙂

Derrick

December 10, 2016

Spencer,
I love what you’re doing! I binge listen to your podcasts while driving.
I have a questions regarding the new metrics since LTP has switched to Majestic: Trust Flow; Citation Flow; Domain TF; Domain CF; KC.

What’s the score I should be looking for with KC, Citation Flow, Trust Flow, Domain TF, Domain CF?

Hey Spencer, EXCELLENT content here! Wow! Thank you for putting this together. Quick question: I don’t own LTP but I do own Market Samurai. I can see the benefits of LTP vs. MS but I can also see some similarities.

Oh BTW, I ran a marathon the other day… prior to the marathon I swam 2.4 miles and biked for 112 miles. 🙂

Congrats on the Ironman! You, sir, have outdone me :). There are similarities between Market Samurai and LTP. One big difference is that LTP provides a Keyword Competitiveness score and Market Samurai does not.

shahab

December 28, 2016

nichepursuits really change my life i am newbie in amazon affiliate but all credit goes to S.hows
thanks

I’ve watched all videos and read whole article for second time. Your post inspired me to create my own web finally. I am sure I have made a lot of mistakes as other beginners, but the most important is beginn not wait.. 🙂
Thank you so much for this post ! 🙂

Mike

Thank you for posting such an article which provides good knowledge about the web development and encourage us to develop NEW WEB SITES

Jp

February 3, 2017

Hey, nice article learned new things from this. What about if your niche doesn’t have any search volyme in those keywords like: best….,guide…..,…..review and so on. And no keyword search in product brand name + model numbers. The searches in google are like this: product brand name example sony tv, black&decker drill..but its too diffucult with those keywords to get on googles first page. Should I instead write articles on keywords with 100-1k searches per month? Or do more youtube videos and and try to promote my site on forums?

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